The two crises in this chapter share three main characteristics. They involve territorial (border) conflict that relates to the independence of Ukraine (or, relatedly, the breakup of the Soviet Union), feature an East–West tension, and (as of this writing) do not escalate to a war among the major states. In 2014, after Ukraine attempted to move closer to Europe (i.e., it contemplated an EU agreement and the pro-Russian government fell), Putin annexed Crimea to secure the long-held naval base there. Although done forcefully, there were no military fatalities. In 2022, amidst a fear that Ukraine was again moving closer to Europe (i.e., it looked to be closer to joining NATO and its government became less pro-Russian), Russia invaded Ukraine. It failed to take Kyiv, even though it heavily bombed Ukraine. Russia then withdrew to the east, where a majority of Russian speakers had sought to separate from Ukraine. The United States and the European Union gave weapons and aid that expanded as the war continued. Deaths mounted on both sides. The Russians successfully created a land bridge from the Donbas to Crimea. After his election, Trump attempted to negotiate a settlement that would end the war.

Instead of ushering in an era of enduring peace and partnership, the end of the Cold War was followed by a decade of turmoil, with wars in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and Chechnya, political violence in Moscow, and controversy over the eastward expansion of NATO. The disappointments and turbulence stemmed in part from the personalities and political choices of top leaders, including the erratic and increasingly autocratic Boris Yeltsin, the skeptical and stingy responses of George H. W. Bush to the reform and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the way Bill Clinton unreservedly embraced Yeltsin while also antagonizing him by deciding to enlarge NATO and wage war against Serbia. As this chapter shows, though, American–Russian relations in the 1990s were also roiled by widely shared popular attitudes, including American triumphalist mythology about how the Cold War ended, unrealistic Russian expectations of massive US aid and respect despite Russian corruption, mismanagement, and weakness. The bright promise of the end of the Cold War was marred both by arrogant American unilateralism and by a Russian slide into depression and authoritarianism.

This chapter reflects on a few crucial terms such as locality and exteriority, arguing from the standpoint that the force of African literature lies in its call to interrogate the very idea of the global and local. Commenting briefly on the early works of two African writers, Chinua Achebe and Assia Djebar, it shows how African literature poses questions about the type of world-making that is underway, namely, who are the beneficiaries and losers in the making and remaking of conceptions of “worldliness”? The essay also speculates on conceptual and theoretical flashpoints that emerge from the encounter between notions of African literature and world literature taken as separate entities. In attempting to recharacterize the theoretical assumptions of “worldliness,” it highlights African writing’s inherent universality, its generalized orientation toward the philosophical, as well as the intersections of terms like locality and universality within African literary criticism.

Italian unification ultimately emerges through four wars. This chapter covers the second of these wars (1859–1860). Austria holds sovereignty over territory in northern Italy. Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont, learns from the first war (1848) that Piedmont cannot defeat Austria – and therefore wrest Italian lands from it – without a powerful ally. He secures an alliance with Napoleon III of France, and at a secret meeting in Plombières, Piedmont and France plot a war. The Italian nationalists argue that the “people” of a nation have a legitimate right to self-rule. The Concert plays no role in this crisis because it does not see the norm of nationalism as a legitimate justification for owning territory. In its view, the norm of dynastic succession (i.e., a king or queen coming to the throne) serves that purpose. The Concert system is therefore biased against the nationalists. The resulting clash of norms increases the probability of war. Nevertheless, territorial issues are generally more war-prone than non-territorial issues, and infusing territorial disagreements with nationalism and identity (or ethnic) claims raises the probability of war further. In the end, the case illustrates well why and how territorial issues lead to war.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

African newspapers could be important conduits for debates around language and identity; more than that, newspapers were often the very crucible through which new African languages emerged. This chapter tells the twentieth-century story of the emergence of a codified written form of siSwati, the vernacular language of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Yet the appearance of siSwati was far from straightforward, and it appeared relatively late in the day, only around the 1960s. Earlier Swati intellectuals had largely used the language of neighbouring South Africa – isiZulu – for their print innovations. By the 1950s, a new interest in a written form of siSwati emerged in step with nationalist aspirations. Yet evidence from African-language newspapers shows us that the development of siSwati was fraught, dissent-filled, and uneven. The periodic and decentralized nature of the mid-century African newspaper made these kinds of debates possible, reminding us of the important orthographic work accomplished by print periodicals.

This chapter covers the Democrat Party’s first term in office (1950–54), focusing on two aspects of this period: first, its leaders’ consolidation of power; second, the ways in which their economic policies of lower taxes, expanded credit, and increased investment depended on close relations with the United States. To secure economic and military aid, Democrat Party leaders sent soldiers to fight in the Korean War and continuously reminded US officials of Turkey’s strategic value. Drawing on diplomatic archives from the United States, Britain, and Turkey, this chapter reveals the dynamics of these negotiations. Moreover, the chapter shows how control of economic policymaking was a crucial arena of intraparty power struggles, both among the top leadership and at the provincial level. Again, looking at examples from Balıkesir and Malatya, we see how tensions increased between the parties during the early 1950s. We also see how the DP’s control of government allowed it to steer projects to provinces it controlled and penalize provinces that rejected it.

African popular intellectuals in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced public writing in which they lamented the danger of reading ‘like a European’, or quick and mechanical reading practices, which they argued led to the degeneration of the ‘African mind’. This chapter’s case study of Orishatukeh Faduma’s 1919 Sierra Leone Weekly News column, ‘How to Cultivate a Love For Reading,’ reveals how contributors in Freetown reimagined transatlantic public anxieties about race, nationhood, and madness to encourage local readers to ‘read like an African’, which meant slowly, selectively, and critically. Through public writing, Faduma and other popular intellectuals turned globally popular understandings of racial madness on their head to generate the ‘right’ kind of African reader. They used the press to produce a distinctly African literary culture in between the local and the global, and thus used literacy as a social vehicle of colonial self-making.

Later performances of the Nonet led to great critical acclaim for Farrenc, and the relationships that it fostered led her to write more music for wind instruments (a sextet for piano and wind, a flute trio, and a clarinet trio). She won a newly founded prize (the Prix Chartier) for chamber music composers twice in the 1860s. The success of the Nonet in later performances led critics to call for more performances of her symphonies by Paris’s major orchestras, but these seem not to have materialized. Farrenc’s legacy after her death was as one of France’s best composers of instrumental music. Although her works were rarely performed after the 1870s, she was consistently named among lists of women composers in Western history when writers began to pen feminist critiques of concert music culture – these began during her lifetime, as early as the 1850s, and emerged intermittently during the 1880s and up to the present day. Recordings of Farrenc’s music began to bring her to wider attention in the 1970s, and with reviews of these and of the increasingly common public concerts of her chamber music and symphonies, Louise Farrenc has entered the canon of historical women composers.

Most public music institutions in the Czech lands have been affected by the region’s complex political history. This chapter focuses on the politicization of public music institutions dedicated to opera (both opera theaters and opera companies, such as the Estates Theater, the Czech National Theater, and the New German Theater) and symphonic music (both concert halls, such as the Rudolfinum and the Municipal House, and the ensembles that performed in them). To avoid Pragocentrism, the chapter also explores music history in the north Bohemian spa town Teplice (Teplitz). Unlike Prague, Teplice remained a predominantly German-speaking city until the forced removal of the German population from the Czech lands after World War II. In both cities, musical institutions transformed according to their inhabitants’ social and political preferences, and musical works of the past entered the artistic canon in connection to patriotic and national agendas.

As ethnic competition gained momentum on the local level, similar developments occurred at the regional level. Decolonization in the postwar period involved constitutional reform and the slow development of African political parties. The British government used constitutional reform to ensure its political and economic interest to maintain the status quo, while emerging African political parties engaged constitutional reform to make various claims for self-determination. The British government insisted African political parties operate at the regional level and discouraged any efforts to form broad, multi-ethnic, cross-regional nationalist parties, such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) had aimed for. By 1952, broad nationalist sentiments had distilled into a regionally focused politics. In this context, ethnic majorities within each region had more power than their minority counterparts. The emerging regionalist politics informed the development of a minority consciousness among Niger Delta elites in the 1950s, and they engaged the constitutional reform process through their positions as minorities to claim the right to self-determination.

This chapter traces the development of choral singing in the Bohemian lands throughout the nineteenth century. Civic choral activities in Bohemia began taking shape in the 1840s, ultimately playing a central role in nationalization processes. However, the mass nationalization tendencies faced setbacks in the 1870s due to economic problems and political crises, delaying the full reconfiguration of the Czech choral movement on an ethnocentric principle until the late 1800s. At the same time, even by the end of the nineteenth century, most German-language choral societies maintained regional affiliations established in the 1860s, rather than embracing ethnic ties. Furthermore, choral activities were influenced by the emergence of the industrial working class. During this period, choral endeavors were also affected by the contradictory impulses to view choral singing as both a social activity and an artistic endeavor.

During the nineteenth century, the symphony carried many connotations – seen both as the pinnacle of achievement in instrumental music owing to its lingering Beethovenian prestige and as an increasingly outdated genre to be set aside in favor of the more progressive symphonic poem. The symphony also had uniquely German associations, making it a complicated vehicle for Czech composers at a time when the Czech nationalist project took on a new centrality.

This chapter investigates how these dichotomies – of traditional versus modern, abstract versus concrete, and Czech/Slavic versus Viennese/German – played out within a Czech context. Against the backdrop of these tensions, the chapter surveys the symphonic oeuvre of nineteenth-century Czech composers, focusing on Dvořák. In foregrounding the perspective of the Czechs, this study aims to complicate prevailing symphonic narratives and expose the many challenges and contradictions that Czech composers faced when pursuing this genre in the nineteenth century.

In order to understand the current intercommunal violence in the western Niger Delta we must examine the historical deprivation of representation and resources by the Nigerian state--in its colonial, nationalist, and post-independence forms. This introduction provides an overview of this historical process, laying out the key interventions of this book. First, Nigeria’s current political culture relies on the competition between majority and minority ethnic and religious groups. Second, minorities are constitutive of the national story, and their existence disrupts the standard nationalist narrative that centers a tripartite social structure based on the three numerically major ethnic identities. Third, considering the history of minority communities in Nigeria compels us to question the nature of citizenship and belonging in modern Nigeria.